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There was nothing inevitable about the development of the Shibuya-kei music movement in Japan. This revolutionary cultural explosion and rambunctious insertion of new influences into the stale domestic industry came from the fingertips of a few individuals — most importantly, Oyamada Keigo and Ozawa Kenji of the band Flipper’s Guitar.

Even though Flipper’s broke up suddenly in October 1991, they managed to establish the sonic palette that would guide both Japanese indie and popular music until the end of the century. Apart from their actual albums and singles, Oyamada and Ozawa influenced tastes through a monthly column in Takarajima as well as a weekly half-hour radio show on FM Yokohama entitled “Martians Go Home” (マーシャンズ・ゴー・ホーム). Handing two bratty 22 year-olds (with no proper management company affiliation) keys to the airwaves could have been a disaster (or more likely, boring), but being the country’s premier foreign music nerds, they introduced listeners to an incredibly wide range of obscure music, including UK Neo-Acoustic, 60s Groove Jazz, Psychedelic Pop, “Funk-a-Latina”, Madchester, and fellow Japanese indie bands. The United States enjoyed “college rock radio” as the medium for diffusing musical innovation in the ’80s, and although the scale was much smaller, “Martians Go Home” played a similar role in “educating” an entire generation in Japan.

As a way to better experience this piece of history, we have digitized select episodes of “Martians Go Home” to be available on this site over several installments. (Although there are obvious copyright issues, we feel that the value as historical material for the these “cassette-dubs of a 17-year-old, commercially-unavailable radio show” outweighs rights issues.)

10 Responses

By the way, “Funk-a-latina” seems to be a Japanese-created term. Google can’t find it in English, and I had a hell of time trying to de-katakanaize it in the first place. Anyone know where it came from?

Wikipedia Japan cites early ’80s art-poppers Blue Rondo a la Turk as the originators of ‘Funk-a-latina’ so the unusual naming of the genre in Japan could have been influenced by the name of that band.

The ‘a-latina’ part is probably a play of words on the ‘a la’ of ‘a la mode’ etc, an ageless marketing buzzterm in Japan which would grant it an immediate appeal to Japanese consumers.

The type of music it refers to – Matt Bianco, Haircut 100, Culture Club – etc would have been classified as ‘Blue-eyed Soul’ at the time by the music press in Britain, a concept which for Japanese sounds a little bit, shall we say, exclusive?